Listening to the latest Coode Street Podcast, I have finally discovered why Black Friday is called Black Friday. As you may be aware, much of the retail business is focused on the Winterval shopping frenzy. That’s particularly the case for toy shops, but other stores do very well over the holiday as well. In the US, that shopping period starts on the Friday after Thanksgiving (when everyone except the shop staff are on vacation), and that Friday is the first day of the year on which many retail businesses finally break even, or “go into the black”, as the accounting vernacular has it. Thank you, Gary, for explaining.
Anyway, everyone with a retail store in the US is having a sale at the moment, and that includes ebook retailers, in particular our friends at Weightless Books. You can get 25% off just about anything, and a whopping 50% off books by Small Beer Press. This means titles by people like Geoff Ryman, Karen Joy Fowler, Maureen McHugh, Ted Chaing, Delia Sherman, and of course the first ever Translation Awards Long Form winner, A Life on Paper: Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (translated by Edward Gauvin). Gavin Grant explains all here. If you don’t buy anything else, get Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, because it is an absolutely wonderful book.
That’s the explanation of Black Friday I’d heard too, but then I read this… http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/real-story-behind-black-friday
Personally I’m going with the theory that it’s called that as a timely reminder of the dangers of beri-beri and other diseases caused by vitamin B deficiency, and is a corruption of “B-lack Friday”. Perhaps we’ll never know?
If you follow through to http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/3047/ you’ll get a lot more citations from the Taylor-Blake research on the subject. The current accepted derivation is clearly a back-formation in the wake of a failed attempt to change the popular name for the date.